Video-conference systems are widely used with which a remote conference is held between remote sites through a communication network such as the Internet. In the conventional conference systems, a terminal device of a remote conference system is used in a conference room of one of the parties of the attendees that are having a remote conference.
With the terminal device of the conventional remote conference systems, images of the conference room including the parties of the conference and audio in the conference room such as speeches of the attendees are captured. The captured images and audio are converted into digital data, and transmitted to the terminal device of the other party. The transmitted images are displayed on a display in the conference room of the other party and the audio is output through a speaker in the conference room of the other party. This enables a conference to be held between remote sites in almost the same condition as a real (i.e., not virtual) conference held at a site.
The video-conference systems ensure a substantially wide angle of field to display many attendees in a display unit of the terminal device. This is achieved by providing a zooming mechanism or a moving mechanism that moves upward and downward and to the right and the left in a camera function of the terminal device, or adopting a multicamera including a plurality of cameras.
A fisheye lens camera device is disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 4048511, which includes an image correction processing unit that corrects distortion of images captured through the fisheye lens camera. The image correction processing unit in the device configured to perform calculation by combining two types of coordinate transformation. One coordinates transformation corrects the installation angle of the fisheye lens camera and the other coordinates transformation corrects distortion of images captured through the fisheye lens.